Abstract
What I set out to do in this thesis was to examine Raymond Carver s minimalism. For this purpose I have paid most attention to his collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which is generally considered to be his most minimalistic work. In my analysis I have to some extent applied minimalist theory, but my main focus throughout the thesis was to show how three significant aspects of Carver s fiction, namely omissions, epiphanies and endings, are connected with his distinctive form of minimalism. This approach allowed me to keep a primary focus on his texts.
I felt that it was important to look closely at omissions because they are one the most prominent features in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. When one compares a story from this collection to another version of the same story, which I have done with The Bath and A Small, Good Thing, (the latter from Cathedral) one discovers how much information Carver actually leaves out of his stories when he is at his most minimalistic. In the chapter about omissions, I have also analyzed Tell The Women We re Going and So Much Water So Close To Home where I have applied Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan s theory on gaps to the stories.
In the chapter on epiphanies I wanted to show that, contrary to what many critics have claimed, Carver s epiphanic moments actually accentuate his minimalism and are therefore an integral part of his writings. Here I will look closer at the arrested epiphany, the comic epiphany, and the ironized epiphany in connection with the stories I Could See The Smallest Things, The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off and A Serious Talk.
In the last chapter, I discuss Carver s open endings and how they contribute to his minimalism. I have looked at the signals of closure in three stories; Sacks, Gazebo and Viewfinder. However, what soon became clear to me was that some of Carver s endings were in fact so open that the theory could not be applied to the stories. What I have tried to do in those cases is to modify the theory to fit Carver s fiction.